SAN JOSE — Kognitos, a provider of generative AI for business automation, has closed a $20 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Clear Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Wipro Ventures. The new funding brings the company’s venture capital raised to date to $30 million including a seed round that closed earlier this year.
Founded in 2020, the company aims to build a future where all business applications will be written in English, where machines understand human language natively and where interacting with a computer is as easy as communicating with a human.
AI is accelerating the way business is conducted across all industries. Many of the traditional shortcomings of automation tools including learning curve, cost and time to value are being addressed using the power of generative AI. Kognitos’ approach to automation using a deterministic English interpreter removes the risk of hallucination and biases while providing all the power of generative AI to business users. Now organizations are able to accelerate automation without the need for traditional automation skill sets. Many companies across various manufacturing, logistics, CPG and retail industries are using the product including PepsiCo, Wipro, Century Supply Chain Solutions and Norco Industries. By empowering business users in a language they already know, Kognitos reduces burden on both business users and IT dramatically reducing costs while accelerating business.
“For the last few decades we have been forcing humans to learn the language of the machine through various no-code, low code and RPA platforms. The time has come for the machine to natively understand plain English,” said Binny Gill, Founder and CEO of Kognitos. “No developer should be needed to translate business requirements into automation because now the business requirements become the automation.”
Most businesses today have many document-heavy or coordination-heavy processes that are manual because automating them has been a daunting task with traditional tools. For example, a person in finance who processes a large variety of invoices, purchase orders and contracts on a daily basis finds it hard to explain all the details of what they do to an RPA developer, especially all the edge-cases. Even after automating such processes, the ballooning maintenance costs have resulted in the failure of many projects.
Kognitos uses natural language processing automation (NLPA) to enable business users to automate processes in plain human language. English is now “code.” Kognitos provides a highly scalable bot-less and management-free SaaS platform that can run business processes targeting ERP, CRM and common business applications at scale. There is seamless human-in-the-loop with patented conversational exception handling, removing the burden of business exceptions from IT. The platform dynamically learns from the business users when they handle exceptions, further increasing value to business without the expensive software development life-cycle as experienced in traditional automation tools.
The new funds will be used to enhance the platform’s ability to understand and execute complex business processes, and expand partnerships and integrations with other business applications to improve the platform’s interoperability. These efforts are aimed at establishing Kognitos as a leader in generative AI for business automation and increasing the adoption of the platform.
“Every enterprise needs to embrace AI, and automation in human language will be key to widespread business usage,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “In Kognitos, we are backing a founder we have worked with before who is taking on a bold vision of empowering a billion people to program in natural language where every single business application can be written in English.”
